


there's so much we shouldn't forget

by marveling_under_an_open_sky



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Discussion of Anxiety, Female Friendship, Gen, a friend??, and that says a lot, building relationships in literal hell, dare i say, they deserve happiness, working title: sister!eurydice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:14:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23517520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marveling_under_an_open_sky/pseuds/marveling_under_an_open_sky
Summary: They say Orpheus is a poor boy with a gift to give, but no one tells Eurydice she can give too.•••Eurydice rediscovers.
Relationships: Eurydice & Original Female Character, referenced Eurydice/Orpheus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	there's so much we shouldn't forget

**Author's Note:**

> Quarantine made me remember that I have an ao3 account. I've spent the last three hours working on this and I can't believe my momentum is still carrying me forward.
> 
> Hope you enjoy! <3

They say Orpheus is a poor boy with a gift to give, but no one tells Eurydice she can give too.

There’s someone new holding a pickaxe, someone whose despair Eurydice doesn’t recognize. It’s hard to focus on much, now. What would be the point?

So she keeps her head low, but the stranger drags at her attention. The girl is unused to heaving the pickaxe, and she’s not taking enough care. Annoyance twitches inside Eurydice. If the girl causes an accident, it’ll be Eurydice who’ll get caught up in it.

The stranger has ink-dark hair, that much Eurydice can glimpse through the strands in her own eyes. There isn’t much else to see, or much point in looking harder. The smoke stings Eurydice’s lungs. You’d think she’d be used to it by now. 

Then —

A hiss, a clang, the sound of palms colliding with ground and breath colliding with shock. Eurydice was right; the girl’s fallen, her pickaxe limp.

“Fool,” Eurydice hisses, dropping down next to the girl. She knows that’s not what this scrap of a woman needs, but it seems the smoke has scraped out any bit of kindness. Not that there was much to begin with. “Are you hurt?” 

The girl looks up and oh, she’s young. Can’t be more than fifteen. Eurydice isn’t much past fifteen herself, but that doesn’t matter now, does it? 

The girl’s face is all pain and flushed cheeks. “My ankle, I wrenched it. Didn’t cut myself.” 

“At least you won’t have to worry about blood poisoning,” Eurydice mutters. She hoists the girl up as gently as she can, which isn’t much, and the girl lets out a harsh, faltering exhale. 

“Mr. Wilker!” Eurydice shouts. The foreman is no friend of hers, but she’ll make him listen. He turns, his expression storm clouds. 

“This girl’s hurt her ankle. I’m taking her to the barracks.” 

Wilker spits on the ground. He trudges over and hunches to ogle the girl’s foot, and then some more. Eurydice feels the girl go stiff. Her grip tightens reflexively on the girl’s arm. _Steady._

Wilker jerks his chin. “Go on. Mind you’re back before I come looking.” He won’t, no matter what he says; he doesn’t care enough, but he does care about skin slipping under gaps in fabric. 

Eurydice helps the girl hobble some distance away, then snarls a curse at the foreman’s back. “C’mon. You’re coming to my room. What’s your name?” 

“Daphne.” She has tears in her throat, anyone could hear them, though whether pain or rage or something else Eurydice can’t tell. 

“Be sure you don’t forget it.” 

Daphne’s breath is coming short, too puffed to ask what Eurydice means by that. But she manages, “Why are you doing this?” 

The girl’s words bounce around the inside of Eurydice’s head _why are you doing this why are you doing this why are you doing this why are —_

All she says is, “Keep up.” 

••• 

Eurydice can treat frostbite, fashion a tourniquet, deliver babies, and hold someone’s hand as they slip away from this earth, and so it is no trouble at all to bind up Daphne’s ankle with strips torn from a blanket. 

“I’d tell you to keep off of it as much as you can, but you won’t be able to do that,” Eurydice tells Daphne as she ties off the end. “You can rest a while. Then get back. And be careful!” Eurydice shakes her hair out of her eyes and turns to go. 

“Wait.” 

The pleading in the girl’s voice yanks at her. Eurydice looks back before she can stop herself. 

_Not the only one who looks back, was he?_ Sharpening her voice, Eurydice snaps, “What?” 

“Will you stay?” Daphne raises her chin, but her lip trembles. 

Wilker will do whatever he can to harshen Eurydice’s life if she fails to return. And how can she be expected to help this girl when she can’t even help herself? She shakes her head vehemently, more to herself than to anyone, and steps toward the door. 

And stops at the noise Daphne makes. 

It’s a sigh and a sob together, almost incoherent, the sound of a roof’s last creak before its collapse, the sound a lost child makes when she realizes she must spend the night alone. Eurydice can't walk away from that noise. Not anymore. 

She pivots on her heel before she can give her heart a chance to harden and stalks back to the girl’s side. “Yes, fine, I’m here. I’m staying.” Her voice grates between layers of gravel. 

Light bursts across Daphne’s face and for one moment, she is the sun. But she only gives a tight little nod. Eurydice lowers herself onto the cot, body rigid. She feels awkward and bulky inside the room, corners knocking against corners. 

But it’s been eternities since she felt alive, and she supposes _awkward_ is more alive than anything else. And, maybe, she is thankful. 

••• 

“You never told me your name.” 

Daphne is working right ahead of Eurydice for the second day, and tosses this sentence over her shoulder. She hobbles, of course, but she picked up a stick for a cane somewhere and she’s making do with more spirit than Eurydice expected. 

Eurydice scoops her hair off her brow. Wilken was civil enough yesterday when they returned, Daphne leaning up against Eurydice, civil meaning he spat and jabs a finger back at their abandoned pickaxes. There’s no certainty he’ll be so soft again. But it’s not fear of the foreman that stills her tongue before she replies.

“Chatty, aren’t you?” Eurydice snorts. She kicks some rubble away.

Daphne grunts as she heaves the pickaxe up again. “You have my name. Only fair if you return the favor.”

“Not fair that we’re here, is it? I wouldn’t be much concerned about fairness if I were you.” Certainly Eurydice herself wasn’t at fifteen.

“You’re dodging the question,” the girl points out.

“Am not.” _I sound like a child._ Eurydice forces out a breath. “Are you done, girl?” She lets the last word fly like one of Wilken’s globs of spittle.

“Yes,” Daphne bites out, and sinks her pickaxe savagely into the ground.

••• 

Their shift ends. Daphne clutches her cane and begins to make her halting way to the barracks. 

In a few quick steps, Eurydice has caught up to Daphne. She casts Eurydice an inscrutable glance and continues without a word, but the girl doesn’t chase her away. She just keeps on. 

Eurydice measures out her pace to stay close, in case Daphne should fall. And they walk — walk and hobble — all the way to Daphne’s spot in the barracks. 

Eurydice catches the door with her toe and ducks inside. It’s tidy. All angles aligned. Even the cot, with its ragged blanket and poor excuse for a pillow, is made up neatly. Something that looks suspiciously like a broom stands in the corner. 

Daphne casts her another look as she drags a rickety stool over beside the cot. She perches on the edge of the cot and eases her ankle up onto the stool. 

Eurydice hovers by the closed door, one hand balanced on the doorframe. She can’t bear the silence any longer. 

“Eurydice,” she bursts out. “That’s my name, all right? Happy now?” 

Not _songbird._ No, not songbird. 

Eurydice. 

A flame starts in the pit of her gut, hot and bright and burning all her insides, and she presses her hand against it ferociously. And he slips into her head before she can set her spear in the ground against it. 

Orpheus. 

She breathes out his name, _Orpheus_ , more a song than a word. 

_Come home with me._ Orpheus with the eyes who had seen much and still believed. 

_Your name is like a melody._ He said her name like it was starlight. 

_But I’ll walk beside you, love — any way the wind blows._ Eurydice has heard and made a lot of false promises but she never thought theirs would turn out to be one, too. 

_It’s you._ She can’t stop seeing his face. 

She braces her forehead against the wall, knuckles scraped by the bricks, and she will _never_ be able to stop seeing his face. It’s so easy to forget down here. But she has never been able to erase her Orpheus, to leave behind the calluses on his fingertips, the hollow between his neck and his shoulder, the heartbeat she could feel more than hear when she lay against his chest. 

A hand comes to rest on her arm. 

“I’m so sorry.” 

Eurydice dashes the back of her hand across her eyes. “My husband. He — ” 

“I know.” 

Eurydice lifts her gaze to meet Daphne’s. “What?” 

Daphne’s voice is soft. “Your Orpheus. I wasn’t a wanderer like you. I’d spend almost every summer night hanging around him and Lady Persephone and Mister Hermes. Baba wouldn’t let me drink much, but I only came for the music. Orpheus was always kind to me. Taught me how to make those flowers of his, even.” The girl’s fingers twitch. “And...after…” 

Eurydice seizes Daphne’s hands. “You saw him?” she says in a low, throbbing whisper. “Daphne, you saw him up top?” 

Daphne swallows. “I did.” 

“How — how does — ” 

Daphne presses her lips together. “Like you.” 

Heat builds up behind Eurydice’s eyes. _Like me._

“Lady Hestia is taking good care of him,” Daphne croaks. “And Lady Persephone. Mister Hermes, too.” 

“Lady Hestia?” Eurydice’s head jerks up, memory shooting through her. Lady Hestia, long wavy hair, crescent-moon eyes all kindness. Eurydice was traveling — always traveling — three or four months and miles and miles before she stumbled into Lady Persephone’s tavern. 

••• 

It was a bad time. 

It was so bad she couldn't find enough in herself to refuse when a callused but impossibly kind hand took hold of her arm and a gentle voice said, “Come with me.” 

The familiar calculations churned sluggishly through Eurydice’s mind. _This might even turn out all right,_ she thought in mild surprise. It felt impossible to refuse anyway. 

So that’s how Eurydice found herself seated in the softest armchair she’d ever sat in, a tray across her knees bearing a bowl of hearty stew and a mug of hot chocolate. She forced herself to eat slowly, even though she was desperate to stuff it down before this lovely warm dream ended. 

Then, when not even the dregs remain in the bowl, Eurydice wrapped her fingers around the hot chocolate and really looked at her benefactor for the first time. 

A goddess, there was no doubt about that. Dark hair wisping out of a loose bun, her presence inexplicably comforting. 

“More?” the goddess inquired. Eurydice nodded. The goddess moved to the stove in the corner and refilled the bowl. Passing it back to Eurydice, she settled across from her on the sofa. 

“I’m Hestia.” 

“I know. I’m Eurydice.” Eurydice is not one to be daunted by status, but kindness is different. “Thank you, Tía —” Eurydice’s cheeks flamed. “I meant — Lady Hestia, I’m sorry.” 

Hestia smiled. “Tía is fine.”

••• 

“Lady Hestia is taking care of Orpheus?” Eurydice repeats now. 

“Lady Persephone had something to do with it. He’s got care.” _Better care than you,_ Eurydice can almost hear Daphne think. 

“Good.” Weakly, Eurydice grasps at the wall again. “Good.” _He’s safe._ “Thank you.” _He’s safe._

Daphne’s shoulders move, as if shifting off gratitude she felt she didn’t deserve. “Here, sit. You don’t look like you can stand.” 

Eurydice doesn’t feel it either. She eases herself onto the cot beside Daphne, and buries her head in her hands. For a long time the only sound in the room is their breathing. 

“Will you stay tonight?” Daphne asks in a low voice. 

Eurydice can’t remember the last time she trusted someone so fast — 

No, that’s a lie. She can, far too much. 

— but she replies, “yes,” before hollowness can grow in the space between words. 

The cot is barely big enough for two. Eurydice and Daphne shuck off their overalls and boots and scoot under the blanket. Daphne tugs for more, and Eurydice automatically snatches it back; Eurydice feels a quick, hot jolt of affection that stuns her more than a blow would have.

Daphne pushes more of the stuffing of the pillow over to Eurydice’s side as a peace offering. Eurydice turns over. A little bit of the straw in the pillow pricks her cheek.

Eurydice tries to drift off — she’s tired enough, gods know — but there’s a brittleness in Daphne that pulls at her. She bears it for several minutes, glaring at the opposite wall. Daphne invited her here, hadn’t she?

“What is it?” Eurydice demands when she can bear it no more.

“What?” Daphne’s voice is startled, almost scared.

“Why are you so tense?” Eurydice says crossly. “I can’t fall asleep when you’re like that.”

Daphne shifts, and her voice is small as she says, “Don’t laugh.”

Puzzled, Eurydice replies, “Why would I laugh?”

“It’s just —” She hesitates. “It’s hard for me to sleep if I haven’t swept. If the room isn’t clean.” Defiantly she adds, “Go on. Laugh. I know it’s stupid.”

Eurydice’s brow creases, irritation and curiosity mingling inside her. _It’s just dust and clutter._ And besides, this room is the cleanest thing she’s seen down here. “Why?”

“I don’t know, exactly. It’s hard for me to relax. It — pulls my mind in different directions. It doesn’t feel good.”

Eurydice blows out her breath. “You’ve picked a bad place to have that weakness.”

Though there’s darkness around them, Eurydice senses Daphne flinch.

“I know.”

And they don’t say anything more. But Eurydice can feel Daphne grow only more taut. Guilt stabs at her. There will be no sleeping for either of them. 

Eurydice bolts upright. “All right. All right.” She swings her legs out of the bed and finds a candle, a match on the stand next to the cot. When she strikes the match, she illuminates Daphne’s agitated face. 

“What are you doing?” 

Eurydice lights the wick and sets it down onto the stand, extinguishing the match with a sharp exhale. “I’ll clean. You can’t do it with that ankle. Tell me what to do.” 

Daphne sits up, fists balled in the blanket. She’s wary, as if expecting Eurydice to burst out laughing at any second. To scoff, say of course she wasn’t actually going to indulge her _weakness._ “I usually sweep first.” 

Eurydice grabs the broom. She’s not used to holding one; she rarely stayed in one place long enough to worry about cleaning, and besides, she’s comfortable in messes. But she manages to sweep, long strokes collecting bits of this and that into a pile, which she whisks out the door. 

“Did I miss anything?” she asks. Daphne’s dark eyes dart around, and she shakes her head. “Now what do I do?” 

“I...can you move the stool back against the wall?” 

Eurydice does it. She closes the shutter of the window and neatens up the items on the stand — the candle and matchbox, a small knife, a hunk of bread. 

“Is that all?” she asks. 

Daphne gives a tiny nod, and Eurydice replaces the broom in the corner (placed just so) and returns to the cot. She swallows. “I’m...sorry, Daphne. I shouldn’t have called it a weakness. And you didn't pick it, either.” 

Daphne just stares at her. Then, a dip of her chin. She makes room for Eurydice on the cot again. Eurydice crawls in. 

Neither says good night, but it doesn’t feel as if they need to. 

••• 

It has been a long time since Eurydice was this close to another human being, longer still since she awoke to more than the sound of her own breathing. For a second she doesn’t know where she is, and fear charges through her faster than thought. And even when she remembers, it takes some time for her heartbeat to slow to normal. 

There’s no sun in Hadestown, but it does get brighter as whatever a day here is plows forward. It’s still early. 

Eurydice shifts her head. Daphne has one arm draped across her stomach, her mouth slightly, slightly open. In the light she looks so young. Closer to ten than to twenty. How did a child (a child; in the past hours Eurydice has seen Daphne shift in and out of a woman but truly, she is still a child) end up in this place? 

She digs her elbow into Daphne’s ribs. The girl wakes with a start. 

“What — oh.” She shoves Eurydice back, a reflex, and Eurydice tumbles to the floor with a holler. 

“I’m so sorry!” Daphne yelps, but Eurydice is already laughing, already springing to her feet and walloping the other girl with the pillow. The mirth tastes sweet in her mouth. 

Daphne squeals and throws her arms over her head. “Don’t, don’t! All the stuffing will come out and then what’ll we do tonight?” she protests, hardly able to speak, she’s laughing so hard. 

Eurydice drops the pillow at this and plops onto the bed, body shaking with chuckles, and suddenly Daphne hugs her around the middle. Eurydice reaches up, her fingers curling around Daphne’s arm like they know where they should go. Their laughter fades. They hold each other closer. 

_Funny,_ Eurydice thinks, when they let go and she makes the bed, craning her neck to ask Daphne whether she’s doing it all right. _There’s more than smoke down here._

Daphne divides the bread into two perfect halves. “Catch.” She tosses one into the air. 

Eurydice cradles it in her palms. “Thanks.” Daphne raises her own piece of bread like it’s dandelion wine and Eurydice bumps the crust of her piece against Daphne's, and then Daphne’s eyes go wide. A giggle bursts out of her. 

“What?” Eurydice sinks her teeth into the bread and raises her eyebrows at Daphne. 

“Eurydice. Get it? It’s a _toast._ ” 

As Eurydice chokes and flails her bare foot against Daphne’s good ankle repeatedly, as she lets out the loudest and most exasperated groan she can muster around the crumbs in her throat, but she can't stop another thought from bubbling up. 

_Maybe there’s even sunshine._

**Author's Note:**

> If you know Daphne in Greek mythology, you'll be able to connect the dots and figure out how she ended up in Hadestown. 
> 
> I've been sitting on this story since August 2019, and I just spent the last _four_ hours polishing it and converting to HTML. I'm tired. But I hope this fic helped provide just a bit of escapism from the awfulness in the world right now, and if it accomplished that, I'm happy. 
> 
> Stay safe and healthy out there!!
> 
> Blessings <3


End file.
